Mismatched coarticulatory information hinders lexical access of coronal stops in Malayalam

Coarticulatory information affects lexical access, more so among dense inventories. We explore the Malayalam dental, alveolar and retroflex stop contrast. In this eye-tracking study, VC:V words were used where ‘C’ was one of the three stops. Consonants were cross-spliced with either the same stop (match condition) or one of the other two from an identical vocalic environment (mismatch condition) to generate real word audio stimuli. Participants viewed two words, followed by an audio. Pupillary fixations were analysed for 3 conditions- target matched with audio; audio from the ‘mismatch condition’ with the the distractor and audio either sharing a stop or not. Participants looked at the target and distractor at the same rate in the second condition. Coarticulatory information from two different consonants in the audio impacts lexical access. Presence of matched coarticulatory information results in higher looks at the target, even if the distractor is from the same phonological cohort.

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Recommended citation: GP Seema, Meghavarshini Krishnaswamy, Ramesh Mishra, Indranil Dutta. Mismatched coarticulatory information hinders lexical access of coronal stops in Malayalam. In Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pages 371–375, 2023.